Designing for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Designing email marketing newsletter is not necessarily synonymous with text-only advertising. There is in fact a growing trend towards gorgeously designed e-newsletters. This series of tutorials will show you how make an impression with your newsletters. With a cohesive marketing campaign, your newsletters can do more than convey text, and can definitely strengthen your brand.

How to Design Marketing Emails?

This tutorial does not show you how to technically design your email newsletter; rather, it looks at usability, and the most efficient way to convey your message. What email format best suits the purpose? What information architecture should you follow? We will answer these questions.

Presentation

How your emails present nearly takes precedence over their content, since your subscribers will decide whether to read the email or discard it based on their first impression. Most third-party email marketing solutions will allow you to customize the look and feel of your newsletters, and pick your own logo, colors, etc. Remember that your newsletter is not meant to be art, just a eye-friendly piece to be read, whose only purpose is to maintain brand equity or convert leads. Every single decision you make should solely revolve around these simple and overarching goals.

Email Title

All modern email clients and online webmail services enable users to delete emails without having to open them. As a result, the content of the subject line is the first hit-or-miss that can determine the outcome of an entire email marketing campaign. Your subject line needs to be short, intriguing, and honest. Forget what your English teacher told you about title case: capitalizing only the first letter of an email title makes it easier and faster to read.

Email Marketing Conventions

With time, tacit email conventions have emerged, and you should only break them at your peril. Every email marketing communication you send should have:

Read Online link - Although most people use an email program or webmail service that supports "HTML emails" (richly formatted, containing images), it is good practice to give users a way to read your email marketing piece in their web browser for three reasons: formatting problems (or lack of support for rich text emails), lossless email forwards, and user preferences.

Worthwhile Content - Emails containing a series of title+link pairs have the advantage of being concise, but they are boring and uninviting.

Administrative Links - Several links should appear in all your emails, ideally near the bottom, either by legal obligation, or for the convenience of your subscribers.